It’s that season again. The one where the real estate people get the media to start all the phony hype that the bust is over. According to the Herald you can’t get an apartment in downtown Miami (a virtual slum) for less than $3,800 monthly. Since there are no jobs that pay that much, they must be sleeping in shifts. A better bet would be the Japanese-style pod hotels, like the 9 Hours. Rumor is, some airports now have them, but I can’t find any data. Nobody is mentioning the 600,000 repos [Fanny & Freddy] being held by the government. The ones due to hit the market the week after you buy.Don’t be fooled by the lack of ads, they always slack off as the tourists arrive and the vacancies dry up until spring. The owners are renting and praying the market will turn around in that period. To get a better scope, do a search on Trulia, specifying Boca Raton, 3 bedroom, and examine the offerings. Beware of Auction.com (weird, secretive, no straight answers about their fees, hidden costs) and pre-foreclosures (no such thing, it is just another lame sales tactic) and slimy agents who slip non-detached units and mobile homes into the “single family home” category. (Pad rentals in Boca can be $700 monthly!) Trulia is half-okay but they lack quality control.
Trulia has one “single family” for sale priced $45,000. The catch? It is in the Royal Palm Yacht Club. The taxes are $94,377 per year. Wait until spring 2013, but keep an eye out for panic sales.
Did you see the hooplah about the teachers who bribed a man with the illustrious name of Clarence Mumford, Sr. to hire cheats to write their Praxis [exams]? The authorities say hundreds of students were taught “by unqualified instructors”. NBC left out the part where school boards became suspicious when students suddenly started passing with straight A’s. I made that part up. Or did I, now?
What gives? Hand drawn circuit diagrams don’t disappear around here. Where is my full adder? This is the kind of thing that puts me in dutch with the future. If my notebook is ever found, the historians will conclude I lacked consistency. That’s because I’ve noticed the type of people who become historians consistently will assume I only have one notebook. I have three. One in the motorcycle, one to carry with me, and main one that I use in the library or bookstore when I know I’ll have a table and chair. And guess which notebook is missing.
Meanwhile, I’m going shopping for a camera that takes close-ups (macros). That’s shopping, not buying. Everyone who has read my resistor booklet likes it, but in the galley proof, all the photos are pirated. They are placeholders for when I go to publish with my own photos. I see my reference last day to Capote, Truman, has thrown some younger readers. Hey, Capote was old when I heard of him myself. He wrote a ground-breaking murder mystery called “In Cold Blood”.
My book should not be a mystery. I liked Capote’s writing because he brought the reader along at a constant speed. Are you listening Stephen King? But in the larger sense, I got more inspiration from James Burke, the Brit “science historian”. He produced a series that took you along a historical set of links back to some modern situation. Like his tongue-in-cheek speculation that the original computer cards were precursored by waterwheels. Entertaining, but not that great for zeroing in on specific information. That’s my job.
ADDENDUM
The NOR gate did not get completed last evening. Instead, several advanced models of the NOR gate got examined. Some were sketches from Colorado that I did not understand at the time, which makes me wonder how I knew which ones to copy. The policy of building the circuits as well as studying them is paying dividends in understanding. I’m tempted to build some modular components used only for testing these gates in addition to the gates themselves.
Was anything new? Yes, when I sketched the model of the type of flip-flop gate used in computers, I see that this particular design requires 16 transistors for each gate. As a regular occurrence now, the significance of a million transistors on a chip is leaving me less in awe. Like most, I formerly thought each transistor did a big job whereas now I get the feeling 16 to a gate isn’t anywhere near the limit. We have two working models of the NOR gate sitting on the work bench.
And here they are; you may notice our telltale “modular” workmanship, one circuit per breadboard. Nice clean work, except for the longer wires which are power connections. The lights are ON even though this circuit is idle, that is a characteristic of a NOR gate. The example on the right was built second, so it already shows improved layout. The reason for two gates is in practice they are usually paired up. I think.Shown also are the power supplies (battery packs) which look a lot like old bicycle lights and four test buttons, the kind that won’t stay put. In this photo, the NOR gates are not yet connected logically. That is slated for tomorrow.
These models become trifling once designed and built, which is kind of the idea. It spurs bigger ideas and as we have seen, it is entirely possible for certain people to “learn” electronics and author books without understanding the basics or building anything. And it shows. By compiling sources, I have designed but not built a full adder circuit using 14 transistors and 8 resistors. It was the old story, I designed it without a lick help, but once I did it myself, I found “experts” all over the damn place.
I did it by drawing out the full logic diagram, examining individual schematics, and then counting up the number of components needed. That isn’t as easy as it sounds because you have to have your bullshit detector set on ten. The pitfall is them “experts” again, where you find all manner of schematics called “novel designs”. In most cases, that means the designer has drawn a picture but has never built and tested it. This fact tends to get buried at the bottom of his long-winded spiel.
And what’s with those sites that use block diagrams instead of real schematics? This is a block diagram. According to the author, yet another expert named Javadi, this is the sort of presentation that is supposed to teach you how these things work. Quick, now build me an adder circuit. Full adder, not half.